THE biggest protests by South African university
students in the post-apartheid era were fuelled by mounting anger over the
widespread poverty and inequality that persists since the country’s first
multiracial elections in 1994.

A week of demonstrations at universities
against plans to raise tuition peaked on Wednesday, when several thousand
students stormed into the parliamentary precinct in Cape Town as Finance
Minister Nhlanhla Nene presented a gloomy picture of the economy in his
mid-term budget speech. Riot police used batons and stun grenades to disperse
them and arrested six people.

“The fees must fall campaign is not about
fees,” Aubrey Matshiqi, a research fellow at the Johannesburg-based Helen
Suzman Foundation said at a conference in Stellenbosch, near Cape Town on
Thursday.
“I do believe South Africa is sliding inexorably toward a perfect storm of
discontent, the discontent of the poor, the working class and the middle
class.”

While South Africa’s economy has more
than doubled in size since the African National Congress took power in 1994,
the benefits haven’t been shared equitably. A quarter of the workforce is
unemployed, income inequality levels are among the highest in the world and
white households on average earn six times more than their black counterparts,
government data shows.

The police documented 2,289 violent
demonstrations by communities demanding better housing, education and other
services in the year through March, up from 1,907 the year before.

First-year tuition at the University of
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where the protests started, ranges from about
32,000 rand ($2,400) to more than 58,000 rand.

‘Promised to us’

“I am here to demand free education
that was promised to us,” Khanyiso Nkolwana, 22, a fashion-design student at
the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, said at the Wednesday protest. “It
was promised to us in 1994.”

The government allocated 27.5 billion
rand for tertiary education in the year through March 2016, which equates to 2%
of total government spending, Nene’s mid-term budget shows. University student
fees amount to 22 billion rand a year, according to Higher Education Minister
Blade Nzimande.

“Government has a limitation of what it
can provide,” Nzimande told reporters in Cape Town on Wednesday. “We are very
sympathetic to the issues being raised by the students. Of course university
fees are very expensive.”

President Jacob Zuma, who secured a
second five-year term last year after the ANC won its fifth election with 62%
of the vote, was due to meet universities’ management and student leaders on
Friday to discuss the fees crisis. Student groups have rejected Nzimande’s
proposal to cap the tuition increases at 6%.

No evidence state will fallThe ANC accused the police of using
disproportionate and excessive force against the students, saying they had a
legitimate right to protest.

“The situation at parliament, in
particular, could have been avoided had the precincts of the institution been
guarded properly,” Stone Sizani, the party’s chief whip in the legislature,
said by e-mail.

While there is no evidence that the
student protests could lead to the toppling of the government, they do pose a
serious challenge for the Zuma administration, said Theo Venter, a political
analyst from North-West University in Potchefstroom, southwest of Johannesburg.
With Nene anticipating growth of just 1.5% this year and battling to meet his
tax collection targets, Venter sees has little scope for the government to
allocate additional funds to education.

“There are definitely bigger issues at
play here than fees,” he said by phone. “This is a manifestation of a much
deeper problem about poverty and the inability of the government to address
inequality.